Monday, June 13, 2016

Then the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah,
and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh. He passed on to Mizpah of Gilead,
and from Mizpah of Gilead he passed on to the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a
vow to the Lord, and said, ‘If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then
whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious
from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, to be offered up by me as a
burnt-offering.’ So Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against
them; and the Lord gave them into his hand. He inflicted a massive defeat on
them from Aroer to the neighbourhood of Minnith, twenty towns, and as far as
Abel-keramim. So the Ammonites were subdued before the people of Israel.

Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah;
and there was his daughter coming out to meet him with timbrels and with
dancing. She was his only child; he had no son or daughter except her. When he
saw her, he tore his clothes, and said, ‘Alas, my daughter! You have brought me
very low; you have become the cause of great trouble to me. For I have opened
my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.’ She said to him, ‘My
father, if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what
has gone out of your mouth, now that the Lord has given you vengeance against
your enemies, the Ammonites.’ And she said to her father, ‘Let this thing be
done for me: Grant me two months, so that I may go and wander on the mountains,
and bewail my virginity, my companions and I.’ ‘Go,’ he said and sent her away
for two months. So she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed her
virginity on the mountains. At the end of two months, she returned to her
father, who did with her according to the vow he had made. She had never slept
with a man. So there arose an Israelite custom that for four days every year
the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephthah the
Gileadite.

This is one of those
stories that makes me hesitant to say “the word of the lord, thanks be to god.”
When things like this—and there’s plenty more, and worse, in the rest of
Judges—appear in the middle of our holy scripture, I have to wonder how they
could possibly be part of our story of good news. How is a story of domestic
violence, of child abuse, a part of our story of God’s desire for all creation
to know peace and wholeness?

Over the centuries,
people feeling this discomfort have tried to solve the story, to make it okay.
They have suggested that she wasn’t really killed, in spite of the fact that it
says her father “did with her according to the vow he had made” and that vow
involved the word that describes offerings that are entirely burned, with no
part leftover. They have used her as an example of faithfulness and appropriate
womanly submission. They have looked at the ritual of girls going out to lament
every year and said the story creates a rite of passage for young women to die
to girlhood and emerge as women ready to be married. They have tried to explain
away the suffering and terror of this text and its implications.

But it can’t really be
explained away. Even God is silent.

What happened here?
How did we get from the Torah’s constant refrain about caring for women and
children to the place where a father sacrifices his child and no one stops him?
In a society that measures its faithfulness by how it treats the marginalized,
how could this happen? In a religious community that cares so much about family,
inheritance, and living in the land, how is it possible for a man to murder not
only his daughter but his family name and inheritance?

As is often the case,
it begins with a desire to be powerful and the instinct to take matters into
our own hands.

This man had been cast
out by his half brothers, looked down upon as inferior, and made to be an
outsider. When they needed his strength and his fighting men, they came
crawling back with promises to make him their leader. He agreed, if God would
give the enemy into his hand…and the spirit of the Lord came upon him, which is
the code in Judges for “God guaranteed the victory.”

But the spirit of the
Lord wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to hedge his bets, make absolutely
certain that things would go his way, so he made a promise. This is the kind of
promise I mean when I say that we should never bargain with God, because if we
had to keep our end of whatever deal we struck, we would be in trouble. He
tries to bribe God: if you let me win this battle, I’ll make a burnt offering
of whatever I see first when I get home.

Remember: there’s no
need for this bargain, and God cannot be bribed. God didn’t ask for anything in
return for the gift of the Spirit. The vow tells us the man doesn’t trust the
spirit of the Lord to be enough.

He wins a victory like
no one has ever seen…and he believe that his initiative in making a deal with
God has bought him the victory…and now believes he has to keep his end of the
deal.

In those days it was
common for livestock to live in the ground floor and courtyards of homes, so
maybe he thought he’d see an animal first. But then again, he would have also
known that ever since the exodus, when Miriam led the women in dancing and
singing after the Egyptian army was drowned, the women of the Israelites have
come out to meet returning victors with tambourines and dancing. It was a
custom meant to honor the warriors and the God who gave them victory.

There’s no honor to be
had this time, though. After he takes the traditional abuser’s route of blaming
her for what he has to do to her, he says “I cannot take back my vow.” And she
agrees, her own trust highlighting his lack of faith.

Here’s where we get
into trouble, isn’t it?

I cannot take back my
vow.

God said it, I believe
it, that settles it.

The scripture is
clear.

We think it’s a sign
of faithfulness. We admire ourselves and each other for standing up for what we
believe in. And we sacrifice God’s children to our self-serving limited human
understanding.

We want to think this
is no longer happening. It’s easier to look back on stories like this with
horror, and much harder to look at them as a mirror, showing us the ways we
still insist that what we think we know is definitely God’s command and
reflecting back to us the uncomfortable truth that our pride will not let us
see the alternatives to some vows we have made in our past.

There were alternatives,
of course. I’m not sure they would be immediately obvious if we weren’t reading
straight through the Bible in such a short period of time, but they jumped out
at me this week: Leviticus 5 has a provision for what to do if you make a
careless or rash vow that then you cannot keep. And Leviticus 27 tells what to
do if the sacrifice you vowed to make is something that cannot be sacrificed.
Both offer options ranging from giving a monetary offering to a clean and
appropriate animal in place of the illegal one. And child sacrifice—and all
human sacrifice—is decidedly and repeatedly forbidden, so this definitely
counts as a vow that cannot be kept.

In other words, “I
cannot take back my vow” is simply not true. It is, instead, a half-truth. Or a
limited understanding of the law. And like abuse still is today, it is based in
human pride, in human desire for power, and human unfaithful action. It is a
man reading his own words as the word of the Lord, and sacrificing a woman to
his own ego. And it is a community saying nothing, because in a time when
everyone did what was right in their own eyes, what is there to say to someone
who thinks they are doing the right thing, even when it is so obviously the
wrong thing?

And so we allow our
LGBT children to be sacrificed to our limited human understanding. We allow our
children of color to be sacrificed to our comfortable whitewashing of history
and our insistence on following rules that were set up to benefit some at the
expense of others. We allow thousands of people to be sacrificed to our
contemporary understanding of a few sentences in documents hundreds of years
old. We allow the vulnerable and marginalized people of the world to be
sacrificed to maintain our own supposedly blessed position. We allow 1 in 4
women to be victimized and we, like the man in this story, blame it on her. We
pretend that none of these things are related. And when we see it happening to
our neighbors, we say nothing, because everyone does what is right in their own
eyes.

The story of this lost
daughter is like the canary in the coal mine—it shows just how much the society
had unraveled, how far they had strayed from their identity and purpose as
God’s people. The man receives God’s gift of love and power, but he cannot
trust God’s word, and so his life reflects only his own brokenness. He takes
God’s good gifts of skill and camaraderie and the spirit’s presence, and he
twists them for his own purpose, using those gifts to serve his desire for revenge
against his half brothers, his desire for power and status in a community that
once cast him aside…and it is his daughter, and their family’s future, that
pays the price.

There is no happy
ending to this story. Unlike Abraham and Isaac, God doesn’t step in to provide
a ram and stop the father’s hand. And the people of God don’t step in to remind
him that there are other ways to understand and follow God’s law. The basic
flaw in the assumption that we can be faithful on our own, without a community
to support and challenge us, is made abundantly clear, as there is no recourse
and no accountability, only one man’s inflexible view of his own understanding
of God’s law and gift—a view that is the opposite of God’s will for the world.

The only glimmers of
light come from the women. The daughter is the only one to utter words of
compassion or faith. Her friends are the ones who model what God’s community is
supposed to be like, lamenting and supporting each other. The generations of
Israelite women who carry on the tradition are the ones who rescue the daughter
from the unthinkable fate of being forgotten by her people and left out of
God’s promise.

These women have no
names in the story—perhaps because they were not considered important enough to
remember. Or perhaps because without names, we have no way to narrow their
story and insist this is one isolated instance of violence. Since we do not
know her name, we can see our daughters in her story, and we can take care that
no one is sacrificed to our arrogance or apathy. Since we do not know the names
of her friends or the names of the women who carried on her memory, we can see
our neighbors and ourselves, and we can practice saying the names of those who
have been lost, supporting each other in solidarity and lament, keeping memory
alive when our culture would rather we forget and move on.

And perhaps more
importantly, we can join the voices of the prophets, the rabbis, the sages, and
even the authors of Judges who insist God had nothing to do with this, and
condemn the ways we sacrifice each other. We can insist that it is not a man’s
right to do with a woman whatever he pleases. We can insist that it is not a
parent’s right to do with their children whatever they please. We can commit
ourselves to stand up and speak on behalf of those who have no voice. We can be
a part of changing a culture that marginalizes some at the expense of others. We
can be the village that helps raise the children, so no one is at the mercy of
one person’s understanding of the world. We can offer the alternative,
expansive, inclusive vision of God’s way. We can work for a world where no one
feels the need to use force to prove themselves, or buy God’s favor, or secure
their own social position. We can listen to those who lament, and we can join
the lament without explaining it away. We can hold each other accountable when
our lives reflect anything other than the goodness of God. We can say, and say
again, and live as if it is true, that violence is not God’s will for women, or
children, or any part of creation.

Then we will be
listening to the word of the Lord, and using our gifts for God’s purpose. May
it be so. Amen.

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Then the daughters of Zelophehad came forward.
Zelophehad was son of Hepher son of Gilead son of Machir son of Manasseh son of
Joseph, a member of the Manassite clans. The names of his daughters were:
Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. 2They stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest,
the leaders, and all the congregation, at the entrance of the tent of meeting,
and they said, 3‘Our
father died in the wilderness; he was not among the company of those who
gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company of Korah, but died
for his own sin; and he had no sons. 4Why should the name of our father be taken away
from his clan because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father’s
brothers.’

5 Moses brought their case
before the Lord. 6And the
Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 7The
daughters of Zelophehad are right in what they are saying; you shall indeed let
them possess an inheritance among their father’s brothers and pass the
inheritance of their father on to them. 8You shall also say to the Israelites, ‘If a man
dies, and has no son, then you shall pass his inheritance on to his daughter. 9If he has no daughter, then you
shall give his inheritance to his brothers. 10If he has no brothers, then you shall give his
inheritance to his father’s brothers. 11And if his father has no brothers, then you
shall give his inheritance to the nearest kinsman of his clan, and he shall
possess it. It shall be for the Israelites a statute and ordinance, as the Lord
commanded Moses.’

How is it going with reading the Bible in 90 days? Today is
day 12…and tomorrow is a catch-up day, so if you’re behind, this is your
moment! I confess that while I was on vacation I was so disconnected from the
actual date that I forgot to start reading on time…and I didn’t notice until
one day there was a facebook conversation about being on day 8. I kept trying
to catch up by reading at cafes and pubs, but what actually happened was that I
talked with friends and got all wrapped up in the delicious food instead. So I
am here as living evidence that it is possible to catch up tomorrow, because I
read all of days 1 through 12 yesterday.

Granted, I didn’t do anything else, except cook dinner. But
still. If you haven’t started yet, this is your chance to get caught up!

Reading through the first four books of the Bible in one day
made one thing far more clear than it had ever been before, even the last time
I did the Bible in 90 Days. In the midst of all the minute details of what
color the curtain in the holy tent of meeting should be, and how many silver
bowls each tribe contributed to offerings, and the list of each place the
Israelites camped during their 40 years in the wilderness…the story is full of
people’s names. I know we know that, because we often think of them as impossible
to pronounce, the kind of things we gloss over because they slow us down while
we try to figure them out. But really, these first four books are bursting with
names. Most of the names are men, of course. They are listed according to their
family and clan and tribe, generation after generation.

I often tell people we shouldn’t skip over the genealogies
that tell us of Jesus’ family tree, as told in Matthew and Luke, because that
is also our family tree—these are our ancestors, and when we remember them we
also find our place in the family story. But those are much shorter than some
of these whole chapters of nothing but the names of men and their sons and
grandsons and nephews and cousins. I really believe all these names are
important, but it was only when I started thinking about asking my rabbi friend
what she preaches on when these long sections of nothing but names and
offerings are read in a worship service—every year!—that I understood more of
what’s going on here:

This is a story of belonging.

Each and every one of those people—all 603,000 men, plus
women and children—is known and belongs. Their story matters, even if we can’t
pronounce their names. They are part of something God is doing. They may have
been whiny and annoying, they may have been complainers, they may have been
people who worked hard and didn’t make waves. They may have been great
craftsmen, or gifted at animal husbandry, or a good teacher, or strong enough
to carry the altar and all its furnishings from camp to camp. And their names,
no matter which tribe they were from or which jobs they did, were worth taking
the time and resources to write down and to pass on through the generations.
Their presence in the community mattered.

So when we get to this story of Zelophehad’s daughters, we
can see why their request was so important.

In order to get to this point, they would already have been
through the system that Moses, at his father-in-law’s urging, set up for people
to bring their grievances and questions to a local judge. Those local judges
passed the hard cases up to Moses for a decision. These women, Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, knew
the rules and regulations of their people. They understood that they were at
the mercy of the men in their lives, and without any men they were in danger.
But they also understood there was a larger problem going on, a problem of
belonging. Their lack of both brother and father meant that they no longer
belonged, and their whole family would be forgotten. And in the midst of a
story that is all about remembering who we are and to whom we belong, that is a
tragedy.

They were surely not
the first women to be in this predicament. But just before they come forward,
in chapter 26, we read about how the promised land was to be divided among
tribes and clans and families, each plot assigned according to the number of
people. The problem of belonging nowhere was about to be magnified by the
problem of having no place in the promise that God had made to their ancestors.
And so Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milca, and Tirzah work their way up through the
system until they are standing in front of Moses at the tent of meeting. And
they brazenly ask for exactly what they want: to inherit their father’s place
in the community of God’s people.

Over the centuries of
God’s story to this point, the people had become more patriarchal than the
earliest stories suggest. The rules had built up, and now there was a careful
system in place. According to those rules and that system, the answer should have
been no. Based on the previous three books of law, these women should have been
sent to marry and find their place that way. But that’s not what happens.
Instead, each judge at each level of the system has taken them seriously. They
are all aware of the seriousness of the problem, of a family of faithful
Israelites being forgotten and left out of the promise. And so Moses goes into
the tent and asks God face to face.

It was a risk, for the
women to place so direct a challenge to the way we always do things. They were
asking for the community to do something that had never been tried before. And
God’s answer was: “the daughters of Zelophehad are right in what they are
saying.”

In essence, God said
to Moses: we have been too restrictive and closed and it is hurting my people.
I don’t want anyone left behind, because each of them matters. Later, through
the prophets, we will learn that God has all our names written on the palm of
God’s hands—even the women who don’t have brothers or fathers. Even the immigrants,
the orphans, and the widows. Even the people who, according to our rules, don’t
belong.

The daughters of
Zelophehad are right in what they are saying. They shall receive the
inheritance of their father.

In one little story—so
easy to gloss over because the names are hard and it’s in the middle of a book
that seems to be a never ending list of identical offerings from every
tribe—everything changed. The inheritance of God’s people expanded. The meaning
of belonging expanded. The understanding of God’s gift expanded. Because five
women were willing to come forward and claim that they too are God’s chosen and
beloved, to insist that they belong to God’s promise, the whole system was
changed to recognize women as people who could inherit and own property, who
could advocate for themselves and know that they mattered.

Ten chapters from now,
the book of Numbers will end with a recap of these women, and a rule made that
they may only marry within their tribe, so that the inheritance may not end up
passed to another tribe. On the surface it feels like a re-assertion of male
dominance and women as property, but looking deeper we can see how consistent
it is: because what the women asked for was to belong, to have a recognized
place among their people. So they remain within their people, and their
inheritance does as well—because yes, it is about land, but it is also about
identity. It is about carrying the name, and having their presence and
contribution matter to the ongoing story God is telling through this particular
people.

So when we read these
stories—whether you start today and catch up on four books at a time, or
whether you’ve been reading all along—pay attention to the names. Not only are
they our ancestors in the faith, they are people God loved, people whose names
and lives are worth remembering. Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, and all
the rest, remind us of the good news: that we belong to God, and each and every
one of us matters.

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